A Path Clear and Bright
by Aurumite
Summary: After a merciless battle, Niles finds an infant abandoned in the rubble. He knows it would be best to kill her, to spare her from the life ahead. But he was salvaged once before, and maybe it's time to pay his way forward.


Above the crackling of the fires, the shrieking of the wyverns overhead, even over Lord Leo's cold command to march, Niles heard it.

It was high and shivery, but it came with surprising force. An insistent, wailing bladder instrument. A mighty bellows. Despite Leo spurring on his horse and Odin following, soot in his yellow hair, Niles turned to seek out the sound.

He wasn't sure what drove him through the cramped alleyways. Morbid curiosity, perhaps. An old, old anxiousness stroked between his ribs as he skirted the debris: mud brick and clay tiles blown off buildings by dark spells, fallen beams, trash fires, bodies and bodies and bodies. He spotted one of his own arrows sprouting from the back of one. It left a messy brown stain on the corpse's white robes—some priest of the Dawn Dragon, as if such bullshit existed. Niles raised his eyebrows and scraped a foot behind himself as he bent to pluck it out, an impertinent bow of thanks. With it back in his quiver, he strode on.

The town had fallen quickly. They weren't far from Hoshido now, and after Cheve, not many were willing to resist the knights of Nohr.

Not that Nohr cared. Garon was just one man, and he couldn't hold an entire country in his fist, no matter how calloused. He needed their blood, their fear. And so Nohr stormed through, and anything that wasn't Nohr's was put to the torch: dark or red hair, creased eyelids, and the roofs over their heads. Only fair, Niles supposed as he followed the thin keening. A strong army sent its message ahead. There was only so much Lord Leo and his siblings could do to lessen its length.

He reached a stone courtyard with a stone church, largely untouched by the fires devouring the buildings around it, which gasped up toward the smoky sky as if to breathe between mouthfuls. Sparks blew across the space with the hot wind like falling stars, and ash swirled into the cracks between the stones.

On the church's steps was a little wooden basket covered with a stained sheet, afloat in the chaos, very flammable, and Niles' chest crunched tight as he walked up the black-scored steps toward it. The crying was almost unbearable in his ears, this close. Amazing how it made itself heard from so far away. Amazing that he had the balls to go to it.

 _Why._

He crouched and peeled back the dirty cloth to reveal an even dirtier baby, naked, thinner than he assumed most babies should be. She screamed in his face and he bared his teeth to keep from screaming back.

"What do we have here," he said instead, jaw taut. "Another fucking orphan. Incredible. Did they think the clergy cared enough to take you in?"

"Niles!"

Odin's voice, but it was far away yet. As usual, Niles ignored it. As the hot wind met her skin, the infant's squalling turned into real tears that left clean tracks down her face.

"Now, now," Niles said as he thumbed them away. "These won't get you anywhere. Pity doesn't exist. If you survive, that'll be your life's first lesson. You should thank me for it."

" _Niles!_ "

He glanced over his shoulder, but Odin hadn't reached him yet. The babe's crying lessened to whimpers when he touched her face, and her eyes finally opened to look at him. Niles held his breath while he stared back. Her lips quivered. He felt his own stretch into a smirk.

"Your parents didn't _want_ you," he told her. "That's why you're here. But don't worry—they're burned to bone by now, and maybe they were chopped into little pieces, first, or trampled into mush by a horse. Either way, they got what they deserved." And oh, it throbbed through him, that savage retribution. "Isn't that delicious?"

The babe kept on making her awful noises. She had dark skin, he realized then, dark like his. Her thin, tangled swirl of hair was pale. She reached for him with her pathetic little chicken arms, fists clenching and unclenching, and he saw her fingers were absurdly long. He examined his own hands, his own long fingers, perfect for pulling bowstrings, fletching arrows, slight-of-hand, lockpicking, reaching down bootcuffs for a dagger; perfect for making women arch and men beg and everyone cry his poor excuse for a name; perfect for wrapping around necks, threading hot needles, poking into wounds when Lord Leo needed information.

Such hands. They should have been chopped off long ago, followed by his head. But before he knew it they were reaching back, and he pulled the infant into his arms and stood with her to survey the courtyard. Her skin was hot even through his shirt. She weighed less than his quiver by half.

She stopped crying, then. Her hands fisted in his mantle.

"Niles!"

That voice wasn't Odin's. Niles snapped to attention immediately, boots clicking together, and from the dark alley came Lord Leo himself, on foot, Odin at his heels. They both stopped in the courtyard and stared at him like he'd lost his mind—like he had any left to lose. The thought made him laugh.

"I fail to see what is so funny," said Leo. "I ordered you to move out. These fires aren't putting themselves out anytime soon. We need to march a good distance before we can make camp for the night."

"Niles," Odin said, a little hushed. "Just what, in the name of all that is eldritch, are you doing?"

Niles realized how he must have looked to them, clutching and being clutched, his spindly hands sheltering the baby girl, almost too big over her bony shoulders and bare bottom.

"I suppose you underestimated what I'd do to find a little ass."

His pun went unappreciated. Odin clenched his jaw and Leo just clicked his tongue: a long and frustrated suck along the edges of the muscle, and that was how Niles knew how much trouble he was in. The longer, the worse—or better.

"Kill it," Leo finally said. Odin's jaw worked again but he cast his eyes to the ground. "It would be a mercy, rather than leaving it here to starve."

"You always have the answers, milord."

Niles drew the knife from his belt. He could make the cut smooth and quick enough to be painless. It was the least he could do. The babe would have nothing but a life of misery, disadvantaged as she already was.

"Who are _you_ to be the hand of Fate?" Odin blurted. "Would you snatch away even the slightest chance of her survival?"

Leo sneered at him; the contempt, the sheer disgust at such naivete was more than enough of a scolding. Odin fell silent.

Niles put the tip of the knife to the child's chin. She tilted her head up with the motion as if he'd only nudged her with a knuckle, and trained her bright eyes on his face again.

For the first time in his career, Niles froze.

"Get on with it," Leo snapped after a long moment. "They're leaving us behind."

"Is it an order, milord?"

Odin looked up. Leo studied Niles, and then finally shifted his stance and folded his arms. Niles watched his expression with fascination. It flickered from stoic nonchalance to amusement to an unsettlingly keen reservation.

"No," Leo said. "It's not."

Niles turned his eye back to the baby. Her head bobbled as she tried to hold it up. The knife pricked the skin beneath her chin and she began to cry again. He watched a drop of blood slide down her throat.

He had been curious. He had been interested. He had been confused. But when he looked back to Leo, the so-familiar form of his lord and master, he realized that what he was most of all, more than anything, was _furious_.

Niles had laughed in the babe's face, but had he not pulled an arrow from a priest—perhaps the very man who might have taken her in? He looked at her, really looked, brown skin and pale hair and two seeing eyes, and the memories he'd worked so hard to drown began to rattle under his skin, surging bile up into his throat. After everything: after the starving and begging and gagging and slicing, after knowing the dry-heaving dread of being left for dead, could he do that to someone else? A grown man or woman, surely, an enemy spy or a pampered patron, and all those that lacked compassion. But her? What had she done to deserve it?

Leo's brown eyes held his for a long time. They were as probing and sharp as they'd been those years ago. Slowly, Niles lowered the knife.

He'd been worthless, back then. Nothing but a decoy—less than an animal, less than _anything_ living. He'd seen all the terrors of the world until there was nothing left to make him cry: not hunger or abandonment, not fire, not blood on his neck. He'd begged for death, for mercy, and cruel, beautiful Leo had denied him.

And if he had been granted life and purpose, he so stained and used, so disgusting, with so many sins...how could he not give the same to a faultless babe? Her only crime was being unwanted, and he knew what atrocities that led to. He'd had the dark noons in the alleyways. He'd felt Leo shake in the night, after Prince Xander finished fighting his stupid invisible evils in the courtyard below, after Princess Camilla slipped by his door to visit another sibling.

Should he not follow his dear lord's example? Was this not his debt to repay?

"Let's get going," he said as he sheathed his knife and tucked the babe's head against his shoulder. Long strides took him down the church stairs and past the men watching him. The girl calmed at the rhythm. "You said we were already running late."

"Niles!" Odin exclaimed, mercifully speechless beyond that. Leo sucked behind his teeth again.

"Of all the foolish, irresponsible—we're still in the middle of a war! How are you going to take _care_ of her?"

"I'll find a way," Niles answered easily.

He always did.


End file.
